"Kehilla Kedosha"... קייק

The Museum responded to my question! They say the koof koof (קייק) stands for "Kehilla Kedosha", which means "Holy Community".  I had never seen or heard this usage before, but Debbie found it on wikipedia, so it must be real :)

Back to Italy in 10 days - so excited.  No Venice this time; Rome instead!

"I'm an engineer, and if I could also dance, I would own the world."

Member of panel on "Science in Science Fiction"

WonderCon 2012

Inevitabilists??

So, I just bought a Mac. A 15" MacBook Pro, to be exact. It took me two days to work up the nerve to take it out of the box, not because I'm actually so scared of new technology or of switching or whatever, but because I have so much WORK to do and so many THINGS to get done and this transition, however fabulous and worthwhile, is going to take more WORK and TIME than I have right now.

‹end whitewhine/firstworldproblems/whatever›

Anyway, I really am overwhelmed with work right now, in four directions:

0) I live at camp for 9 weeks over the summer, so the paperwork/filing/bills etc just piles up. It takes me forever to get all that shit sorted out again when I get home. How many hours did I spend with Quicken today?

1) I have a new job, a largely administrative position, at the (fabulous) school where I also teach Israeli dance. I'm helping coordinate the program in which the majority of our 10th grade travels to Israel for either a short or long period of time, and in which in turn the majority of our 10th graders host a visiting Israeli for the same period of time. The long-program Israelis arrive on Monday. SO MUCH TO DO!

2) I had to miss a lot of my Monday night dance sessions recently because of traveling and holidays, and it's around the 3-year anniversary of my running this session, so I'm having a big anniversary party this coming Monday night, with all kinds of surprises for everyone (free CD to the first 95 dancers!, for example). I kind of feel like I need to build the session back up after the summer, so I'm trying to make this party a really big deal. OMG SO MUCH TO DO.

3) My stint teaching at Stockton Folkdance Camp really did seem to jumpstart my international career, just like I claimed it would (go figure!). So now I have tons of scheduling/planning/networking/following-up to do and I am wayyyyyyy behind on this. Also... a new love in a faraway land?

But I was going to say, about work...
that you should read this great article in Harper's, "The Language of Work", by Mark Kingwell. Here's a bit:

No matter what the inevitabilists say, resistance
to work is not futile. It may not overthrow
capitalism, but it does highlight essential things
about our predicament—philosophy’s job always.
In his 1932 essay “In Praise of Idleness,” Bertrand
Russell usefully defines work this way:

Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of
matter at or near the earth’s surface relatively to
other such matter; second, telling other people to
do so. The first kind is unpleasant and ill paid;
the second is pleasant and highly paid.

Well, back to work.

"You assist an evil system most effectively by obeying its orders and decrees."

-Gandhi

Do something pretty while you can

First session done, second session begun.

Back from a whirlwind weekend of performances and dance camp in Toronto, straight into the insanity of 500+ campers and 100+ temperatures. A crazy day, a quiet hour. Post-shower, sitting and sweating on a plastic chair on the porch of my summer room, catching up on my Harper's Magazine. This, from a sad and self-condemning article from May:

Walking home, I look at the screen of my cellphone for guidance. In the dark it functions like a little flashlight, I am thinking. Maybe it will knit me a tiny sweater to keep me warm.

WAIT, THIS NEVER GOT POSTED BACK WHEN I POSTED IT??

"...the language of design, architecture, and urbanism in Los Angeles is the language of movement. Mobility outweighs monumentality there to a unique degree... and the city will never be fully understood by those who cannot move fluently through its diffuse urban texture, cannot go with the flow of its unprecedented life. So, like earlier generations of English intellectuals who taught themselves Italian in order to read Dante in the original, I learned to drive in order to read Los Angeles in the original.”

- Reyner Banham, Los Angeles: The Four Ecologies



If I had a tumblr, I'd have reblogged this from Hillel Aron. But I don't.

What I love best about this is... ok, there are a million things I love about this, but one of those many things is that it's true: Reyner Banham had never driven before he moved here.

Services available; great rates. Inquire within.

From the "waste books" of Georg Christoph Lichtenberg:

The detection of small errors has always been the property of minds elevated little or not at all above the mediocre; notably elevated minds remain silent or say something only in criticism of the whole, while the great spirits refrain from censuring and only create.

Mark Twin, in 1893:

In the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then he made proof-readers.

On the other hand, Rabbi Akiba (Talmud: Pesahim, 112a) said:

When you teach your son, use a carefully edited text.

"Pheidippides" Robert Browning, 1879

So, when Persia was dust, all cried, "To Acropolis!

Run, Pheidippides, one race more! the meed is thy due!

Athens is saved, thank Pan, go shout!" He flung down his shield

Ran like fire once more: and the space 'twixt the fennel-field

And Athens was stubble again, a field which a fire runs through,

Till in he broke: "Rejoice, we conquer!" Like wine through clay,

Joy in his blood bursting his heart, - the bliss!






4 hours, 50 minutes

_Decline and Fall_ , Evelyn Waugh, 1928

"Frankly," said the Doctor, "I am at a loss to understand my own emotions. I can think of no entertainment that fills me with greater detestation than a display of competitive athletics, none--except possibly folk dancing."



9 hours

_The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner_ Alan Sillitoe, 1959

"Off like the wind along the cobbled footpath and rutted lane, smoother than the flat grass track on the field and better for thinking because it's not too smooth, and I was in my element that afternoon knowing that nobody could beat me at running but intending to beat myself before the day was over."




31 hours

"I believe that the Good Lord gave us a finite number of heartbeats and I'm damned if I'm going to use up mine running up and down a street."

Do we really believe that Neil Armstrong said that?

I haven't actually been running up and down a *street*; I've mostly been training in the park. Yesterday, that was to the tune of EIGHT MILES, which is by far the farthest I've ever run. It was awesome, and I had a show afterward and I didn't even fall down once.

Now we know this running thing has gotten really crazy: next Saturday, instead of training with the Team, I'm going to run in a RACE! My first ever and I have no idea what it's going to be like, but everyone says it's a really good idea to experience that organized-race thing before the actual marathon, the crowds and the starting gun and the whole different atmosphere, so I'm doing it. I still don't care about *racing* per se, in terms of being faster than anyone else (as long as I'm not last) but I think it'll be fun. I'll be running in the Santa Monica Gobble Wobble and I would LOVE it if you want to come cheer me on!!

Jesus, I've been blogging a lot about running lately, huh? I swear, there are other things going on in my life... like... for example... hey, look over there!

From the essay "Dehumanized" by Mark Slouka

Despite the determinisms of the day, despite the code-breakers, the wetware specialists, the patient unwinders of the barbed wire of our being, this I feel is true: That we are more nurture than nature; that what we are taught, generally speaking, is what we become; that torturers are made slowly, not minted in the womb. As are those who resist them. I believe that what rules us is less the material world of goods and services than the immaterial one of whims, assumptions, delusions, and lies; that only by studying this world can we hope to shape how it shapes us; that only by attempting to understand what used to be called, in a less embarrassed age, “the human condition” can we hope to make our condition more human, not less.

Harper's Magazine, September 2009. Page 32

Can you find this for me?

The poem called "My God Father of the Gentiles". I want to read it.

Thank you.

Oh and by the way.....

I BOUGHT A CONDO. I CLOSED LAST TUESDAY. I OWN A CONDOMINIUM.

I need a couch. A dining room table. A bedroom set. Hell, a decorator (ha). Because I'm the sort of kid Anna Quindlen could love:
"I would be most content if my children grew up to be the kind of people who think decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves."

Special Topics in Calamity Physics

The Top Three Reasons I Have Not Yet Put This Book Back On My Shelf, Even Though I Read It A Year And A Half Ago

0. "America's greatest revelation was not the atom bomb, not Fundamentalism, not fat farms, not Elvis, not even the quite astute observation that gentlemen prefer blondes, but the great heights to which she has propelled ice cream."

1. "Not returning phone calls is the severest form of torture in the civilized world. Haven't you read Hit and Run: Crisis in Singlehood America?"

2. " 'Onstage I make love to twenty-five thousand people and then I go home alone,' moaned Janis Joplin, bleary of eye and disheveled of hair."

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn - not just for Bugs Bunny anymore!

"I know there is no Santa Claus."
"Yet you must teach the child that these things are so."
"Why? When I, myself, do not believe?"
"Because," explained Mary Rommely simply, "the child must have a valuable thing which is called imagination. The child must have a secret world in which live things that never were. It is necessary that she believe. She must start out by believing in things not of this world. Then when the world becomes too ugly for living in, the child can reach back and live in her imagination. I, myself, even in this day and at my age, have great need of recalling the miraculous lives of the Saints and the great miracles that have come to pass on earth. Only by having this things in my mind can I live beyond what I have to live for."


Ok, so that's really the end of my post, only I just love this about this book, also, seeing as how it was published in 1943, that is just shows how the more things change, the more they stay the same or somesuch soundbite wisdom:
"Send Francie. The last time I asked for sauerkraut he chased me out of the store," complained Neeley.
"You've got to ask for Liberty Cabbage now, you dope," said Francie.
"Don't call each other names," chided Katie absentmindedly.
"Did you know they changed Hamburg Avenue to Wilson Avenue?" asked Francie.
"War makes people do funny things," sighed Katie.

Freedom fries, indeed.

"The jury has the right to determine both the law and the facts."

--Samuel Chase, U.S. Supreme Court Justice, 1796, Signer of the Declaration of Independence.

"An unwritten rule about blogging is that if you're called to jury service, you're required to write about it." -Metroblogging Los Angeles. (Ha ha. Apparently it is written.)

Therefore, as I am serving my jury duty today and tomorrow, I will serve my blogging duty shortly thereafter. You may want to read up on jury nullification in anticipation.

"The law itself is on trial quite as much as the cause which is to be decided."
Harlan F. Stone, 12th Chief Justice U.S. Supreme Court, 1941

"The pages of history shine on instance of the jury's exercise of its prerogative to disregard instructions of the judge..."
U.S.vs Dougherty, 473 F 2nd 113, 1139, (1972)


Mmmmmmm, sunny days downtown.

Bookslut, November edition... belated.

How did I fail to post this? I just found it in my drafts... oops. Well, December and the eagerly-awaited year-end round-up coming soon.

An easy (for you) month: I only finished five books in November, and I've already blogged about two of them separately. We had:

• In Cold Blood by Truman Capote. More non-fiction that reads like fiction, my favorite kind. Another one for my Metaphors That Don't Suck^TM File: "He had merely fallen face down across the bed, as though sleep were a weapon that had struck him from behind."


• Burning Bright by John Steinbeck. I love theme-and-variations kinds of stories. This structure of the "Play in Story Form" was an interesting idea but hard to believe in as a new genre. This is a tiny book and yet it gets in deep and quickly, and still manages to keep being surprising. I really liked it.


• The Haunted Bookshop by Christopher Morley. About this book I've said too much already.


• Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk.


• A Year in Van Nuys by Sandra Tsing Loh, also already blogged here.

Judaism: from the folks that brought you the weekend.

Fabulous quotation of the day, from 52portions.com:

"Judaism is the world's most obsessive-complusive book club. Every week, religous Jews read a portion or 'parsha' of the Hebrew Bible, so that at the end of a year we've read the whole thing. Then we start all over again."

The Haunted Bookshop

Before we do the big November Bookslut Breakdown^TM, let's spend a few moments with a chance encounter. I love to browse used bookstores, of course, and I usually end up buying 60 million things I hadn't exactly planned on buying... but there are many books floating about in my mind as things I intend someday to read, so if I find a used copy for some silly price, of course I'm gonna get it... I own many many books that I have not yet read, but that means that whenever I finish a book, I wander out into my living room/office/library and get to shop my own shelves for what to read next.


Anyway, I recently discovered the fabulous Iliad Bookstore and wandered in there and indeed bought 60 million books that I was delighted to find. Most of them were books I'd heard of, and things, like I said, that I already intended someday to read. But I did pick up one book that I'd never heard of, and which I took sort of on a whim. It was The Haunted Bookshop by Christopher Morley.

Now, I'd heard of Christopher Morley only by having seen a quotation of his in some other book I read long ago; I'd never actually read a book of his. But I liked the quotation an awful lot, and it was very near to Halloween when this chance encounter took place, in a newly discovered dusty and wonderful bookshop, and by god the name of the book is The Haunted Bookshop! I had no choice.

"For paradise in the world to come is uncertain, but there is indeed a heaven on this earth, a heaven which we inhabit when we read a good book." he says on page 26. Clearly, I was in love.

Now, may I quote at you until you cry?

Let me tell you that the book business is different from other trades. People don't know they want books. I can just see by looking at you that your mind is ill for lack of books but you are blissfully unaware of it! People don't go to a bookseller until some serious mental accident or disease makes them aware of their danger. Then they come here. ... People need books, but they don't know they need them. Generally they are not aware that the books they need are in existence... I am not a dealer in merchandise but a specialist in adjusting the book to the human need. Between ourselves, there is no such thing, abstractly, as a 'good' book. A book is 'good' only when it meets some human hunger or refutes some human error. A book that is good for me would very likely be punk for you. My pleasure is to prescribe books for such patients as drop in here and are willing to tell me their symptoms. Some people have let their reading faculties decay so that all I can do is hold a post mortem on them. But most are still open to treatment. There is no one so grateful as the man to whom you have given just the book his soul needed and he never knew it. ... The world has been printing books for 450 years, and yet gunpowder still has a wider circulation. Never mind! Printer's ink is still the greater explosive; it will win.
--pp16-18

"Her cheeks were cool and ruddy from the keen air, her face lit with the tranquil satisfaction of those who have sojourned in the comfortable city of Boston." --p38

Printer's ink has been running a race against gunpowder these many, many years. Ink is handicapped, in a way, because you can blow up a man with gunpowder in half a second, while it may take twenty years to blow him up with a book. But the gunpowder destroys itself along with its victim, while a book can keep on exploding for centuries... When you read that book you can feel it blowing up your mind. It leaves you gasping, ill, nauseated--oh, it's not pleasant to feel some really pure intellect filtered into one's brain! It hurts! --p115

Check this one out and note that this book was published 90 years ago. 90!
"We had to beat [Country], yes, but the absurdity lies in the fact that we had to beat ourselves in doing it. The first thing you'll find, when the [X] gets to work, will be that we shall have to help [Country] onto her feet again so that she can be punished in an orderly way. We shall have to feed her and admit her to commerce so that she can pay her indemnities--we shall have to police her cities to prevent revolution from burning her up--and the upshot of it all will be that men will have fought the most terrible war in history, and endured nameless horrors, for the privilege of nursing their enemy back to health. If that isn't an absurdity, what is?" --p114

"All right," said the bookseller amiably. "Miss Chapman, you take the book up with you and read it in bed if you want to. Are you a librocubicularist?"
Titania looked a little scandalized.
"It's all right, my dear," said Helen. "He only means are you fond of reading in bed. I've been waiting to hear him work that word into the conversation. He made it up, and he's immensely proud of it."
"Reading in bed?" said Titania. "What a quaint idea! Does any one do it? It never occurred to me. I'm sure when I go to bed I'm far too sleepy to think of such a thing." --pg170

"But we are what we are, and Roger was even more so." --p172

On Not Writing

What English-language poet has not at times rebelled against a language in which the suffix -s makes a noun plural and a verb singular? ---W H Auden

So, as I've mentioned before, people around me seem to think I'm meant to be a Writer. I myself haven't really believed this since around about the 6th grade, but at least a few of my friends are convinced I will someday write novels and lots of other people are always asking, "Do you write?" with an unmistakable tone of "You idiot, why aren't you Writing?"

Also as I've mentioned before, I recently went to see Ann Patchett, author of the fantastic memoir Truth & Beauty and the lovely novel Bel Canto, read from her new book Run. The reading part was great, but the Q&A that followed was even better, and one of the best bits was the story about this extremely humbling conversation she had with her stepson on the day she had completed both writing her latest novel and reading one by Henry James. "Oh, you finished the new book, that's cool," the son remarked. Then, "Wow!! You finished the James? That's great! Congratulations! What did you think?!" and on in this breathless excitement.

Why did the former accomplishment garner such lukewarm praise, such a muted response in comparison to the latter? "Consider how many people have read all of Wings of the Dove compared to how many have written a book," he told her. She had to admit he was right; in a way, it was a larger accomplishment to have been the consumer than the producer. In this instance, the consumers, the readers, were a far more elite group.

Smiling ruefully over this anecdote later that night is when I first happened on the snarky and wonderful 101 Reasons To Stop Writing. Messages from the universe, gentle reader?

Well, but then I post a nothing post about *not* posting in response to someone messaging me "why don't you write in your blog anymore" and I immediately get five comments urging me to keep writing. Mixed messages from the universe, then, my five gentle readers.

Holy Cow.

• Phil Rizzuto died a month or so ago. This is interesting news because not just do I know that he's the guy who does the pseudo-sports-announcing in "Paradise by the Dashboard Light" but I also actually own the book O Holy Cow!: The Selected Verse of Phil Rizzuto which has his real broadcast comments written in verse form and it rules. Bye, Phil.
  
  
• Um, this blog ALSO says "blah blah blog". And here I thought I was so original! Ok, time for the Official Google Test:
  Results 1 - 10 of about 335,000 for "blah blah blog". (0.08 seconds)
  335,000. Damn.
  
  
• How bad do I want to see/be a part of/at least hang out with The Rock Bottom Remainders? Read the Quotations section. LOVE IT.
  
  
• Nice bumper sticker: "At least we're winning the war on the environment."
  
  
• In case you were wondering about car insurance companies: Mercury Insurance SUCKS ASS. Geico rules.
  
  
• Quotation of the week:
  "Night, I have discovered, has a faintly bitter taste, caused by its large ingredient of Unattained Possibility."
  --Christopher Morley in John Mistletoe (according to p198 of Sixpence House)
  
  
• What is it with emotional attachment to clothes? I almost NEVER wear t-shirts anymore but I have huuuuuge stacks of them that I can't get rid of because of some kind of crazy nostalgia. T-shirts, folks. WTF?
  
  
• The Falling Sand Game is kind of fantastic. It's considered the Best Time Waster on The Best of Everything blog, which is in itself an ok time waster but not as good as the same guy's blog Thinking the Lions which I quite like. [Hey, he commented on egg salad! Woo-hoo!]